Sociocracy and Permaculture. Designing the future

I’ve just finished watching the first half of the long discussion and I can’t help watch this informal discussion and think of formal languages, my my case programming languages. I hear Edge and think of Interfaces, of Circles and Processes, of People and Threads, along with all the problems that come with ensuring the integrity of such Operating Systems (Communities) from both internal and external attack that ultimately lead to disruption and break down of these systems.

In computing the best formal systems I’ve come across to tackle this are Capability-based systems. An example being Google’s Caja, a tool for making third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript relatively safe to embed in your website by providing external source code, the interface, a set of safe rules to follow.
You could think of a persons sociocracy interface as a website. Where the multiple circles a person is a member of are embedded onto the persons website and define the interfaces to those circles. That person could interact within those circles only through the capabilities interface allowed by circle members, and members themselves can only interact by the capabilities given to one another. Within these kinds of systems trust is vital, and the only way to ensure that is with auditing and policing within those circles, such as in the use of a blockchain used as a ledger for interactions. Markets such as the Australian beef industry are already testing blockchains for trust circles.

While in the open source world Mastodon (github) is attempting rule-based control in decentralized social networking. In Mastodon anyone can setup an Instance (circle). That Instance can Block or Whitelist other Instances and aggregate/federate those Instances into a single Federated Timeline. Users can apply scope to messages limiting who within the Federation can see, and how they can interact with those messages. Currently in a very rudimentary way.